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WE look before and after at the beginning of 1951. The three cardinal dates in the history of the public library movement—which is only the larger part of the national library service—were 1850 which saw the legal origin of the movement; 1919 when it was set free from the enforced poverty of sixty‐nine years, and 1950 when it reached what until today was its veritable apotheosis. General recognition, such as authority from the Crown to the humblest journal gave to public libraries, was something undreamed of not more than thirty years ago. Perhaps, now that some of the splendour of the commemoration has taken more sober colours, it is well to consider what was gained by it. First, the recognition is there and can scarcely be belittled by anyone hereafter; we stand on a somewhat different platform now. We have the extremely valued recognition of our colleagues from libraries overseas. From these advantages all libraries and not only public libraries will in their own way profit.

From the 1960s onwards, students and members of the academic community on growing numbers of college and university campuses in the United States chose to confront the issue of apartheid by advocating divestment from corporations or financial institutions with any sort of presence in or relationship with South Africa. Student divestment advocates faced serious opposition from university administrators as well as opponents of institutional divestiture both at home and abroad. Despite these challenges, the academic community in the United States was one of the first arenas where anti-apartheid activism coalesced. This chapter examines the campaigns of students and educators who participated in the debate over divestment – to engage with the South African government and apartheid through dialogue and communication or to disengage completely from the country through withdrawal of financial investments. The anti-apartheid efforts of the academic community at Michigan State University, one of the first large research universities in the United States to confront the issue of apartheid and divestment at the university level and beyond, serves as a window to view academic activism against apartheid. The Southern Africa Liberation Committee (SALC), a consortium of students, faculty, and community members dedicated to aiding the liberation struggle of Southern Africa, led the efforts at Michigan State and collaborated with allies across Michigan and the United States. SALC focused most of its efforts on South Africa, though the organization also confronted the issue of South Africa's controversial occupation of South West Africa and the ongoing civil war in Angola.

The field of special education has come a long way with regard to providing services for young children with disabilities; but, more investigative research is needed. From the very beginning, young children with disabilities were not served in our public schools. This created turmoil for families and parents, and advocacy groups then got involved to spearhead the development of federal laws to support these young children. Through these federal laws and with the help of teachers, researchers, and other key professionals, young children with disabilities were more openly identified, assessments were created and evaluated, and interventions for their success were created and measured. Family-centered services were created so that parents could be involved with the development of their children. In the same vein, evidence-based practices were developed and enacted. Another area that has helped these children is assistive technology with a focus on literacy, communication, and other educational areas. While the field of special education has come a long way, there is more to do. This chapter and volume highlight what has been done and what can be done to enhance the education of young children with an array of disabilities.

Labour has been well spent in the analysis of nutritional needs, by demonstrating the nature and multiplicity of the individual factors concerned. These labours must still continue. Yet such is the nature of the body as a whole that we must at the same time endeavour to view nutrition from some unitary stand‐point. Every factor in a dietary exercises its functions in union with those of others, and we have yet to learn with more exactness what should be the balance among them in an ideal dietary.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which transcription is creative work, the degrees to which current literature elides or explores these creative elements, and the ethical implications of researchers’ standard disacknowledgement of transcription as an intra-active suturing together of verbal exchanges, personal understandings, and texts.

The authors’ analysis is based on a review of literature, with this paper putting specific sections of qualitative inquiry into conversation with one another, along with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Karen Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering.

First, in a preliminary literature review of 200+ articles, the authors found that few researchers acknowledge the creative and decision-making processes that are inherent in transcription. Second, building on that finding, the authors explore the ways that others have discussed transcription as creation/creative and the ways that Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering – which directly influences our use of Shelley’s Frankenstein – has influenced qualitative inquiry.

Transcription is pervasive in qualitative research, with some researchers finding that upwards of 60 percent of research is based on transcribed interviews. However, there is little examination of the creative processes inherent in transcription and the ethical implications of those processes. In terms of limitations, because this is a conceptual paper, it is based on a discussion of various aspects of the literature rather than specific findings demonstrating what the authors argue.

There is real risk in transcription being positioned as merely a task to be completed, to get to the “good stuff” of analysis and writing. Transcription carries implications bound with the responsibilities of creation and interpretation, and researchers who aim merely to achieve and work from a “verbatim” transcript skip over all of the parts that make this common process matter, both to researchers and the researched. The authors argue that qualitative researchers find before them a range of options when they begin the seemingly mundane task of transcription. The keystrokes begin the suturing process, binding together word, action and emotion in a document. Perhaps more importantly, though, the process of creating a transcription is a continuation of the range of ethical implications that research has for participants and researchers.

The authors suggest a similar degree of responsibility for researchers who transcribe and/or work from transcriptions, though the concerns are the inverse of Frankenstein’s creature’s. Researchers are focused on the final product – the transcript itself. That document becomes the basis of analysis, of arguments, of understandings. Researchers need to be as aware of the sutures, cuts and stitches that form their transcription as they are of the final product. There are ethical implications of not exploring the degrees to which the transcripts themselves are creatures – born of decisions, of available resources, of researchers’ own assumptions and understandings.

While Barad’s concepts of spacetimemattering and Frankenstein have informed qualitative inquiry, there is no scholarship linking this theoretical discussion to the process of transcription, which is an important element of a substantial amount of qualitative data.

The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats by religious and medical “experts,” but also of surgical assaults on female reproductive systems (Longo, 1979, 1986; Scull & Favreau, 1986; Sheehan, 1997). Less well known is the apparent obverse: the use of medical techniques to stimulate the female genitalia as a means of treating hysteria and other mental disorders (Maines, 1999; Schleiner, 1995). In this paper, I trace the cultural history (mainly Anglo-American) of the psychiatric enhancement, as well as repression, of female sexual pleasure, through various genital treatments, including the surgical and the electrical.¹ I then make the case that these “opposite” treatments are, in the context of Victorian society, two sides of the same coin of the patriarchal, medical control of female sexuality.²

WE publish this issue on the eve of the Brighton Conference and our hope is that this number of The Library World will assist the objects of that meeting. Everything connected with the Conference appears to have been well thought out. It is an excellent thing that an attempt has been made to get readers of papers to write them early in order that they might be printed beforehand. Their authors will speak to the subject of these papers and not read them. Only a highly‐trained speaker can “get over” a written paper—witness some of the fiascos we hear from the microphone, for which all papers that are broadcast have to be written. But an indifferent reader, when he is really master of his subject, can make likeable and intelligible remarks extemporarily about it. As we write somewhat before the Conference papers are out we do not know if the plan to preprint the papers has succeeded. We are sure that it ought to have done so. It is the only way in which adequate time for discussion can be secured.

ONE evening, while in Virginia, I dined in very select company—for I was the only guest present, excepting the Secretary of the American Library Association, who had not been a president of that body. I was not, however, the only Englishman in the party,—and by Englishman in this paragraph 1 mean British born,—for Andrew Keogh, the Librarian of Yale University and President for 1929–30, sat opposite me. Keogh, like myself, was born in Newcastle‐on‐Tyne.

The Remote Center Compliance (RCC) device is a mechanical device which acts as a multi‐axis float to achieve lateral and angular alignment between components which are being mated during assembly operations. The device has been evaluated for assembly applications and its operational characteristics and limitations in achieving automatic mechnical alignment are described.

The archaeological record of small-scale societies is replete with examples of people expending considerable labor to craft both places and objects for communal rituals. Archaeologists often infer these efforts to have been the product of aspiring elites. This chapter focuses instead on the larger community responsible for the construction of places and objects, through a ritual economy analysis of the social logic people use to organize the production of ritual places and paraphernalia. A review of ethnographic and archaeological data suggests that the production of communal ritual places often involves the creation of sociograms, while the production of objects for use within these places encompasses a web of complementary and competitive relations. Two examples of large-scale communal ritual spaces, the early British Neolithic causewayed enclosures and the Ohio Hopewell geometric earthworks, are explored in light of these ethnographic and archaeological patterns.